Weekly Review

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who said in 2009 that he didn’t “think we should pass bills” when “we don’t know what they cost,” brought to a vote the American Health Care Act, the cost of which has yet to be determined by the Congressional Budget Office.[1][2] Ryan said that passing the bill was Republicans “keeping our promises,” and then deleted from his website a statement that Americans should never be “charged more for a preexisting condition.”[3][4] South Carolina representative Mark Sanford said he did not read the bill, but voted for it; Virginia representative Tom Garrett said he did not read “the whole bill,” but voted for it; New York representative Chris Collins said that he “wouldn’t be telling the truth” if he said he “read every word” of the bill, but voted for it; Florida representative Mario Diaz-Balart said he did not like the “highly imperfect” bill, but voted for it so he could “stay involved”; and 15 Republican representatives who initially did not support the A.H.C.A. reportedly received a total of $37,500 in new campaign contributions from the medical industry and then voted for the bill, which passed with a margin of four votes.[5][6][7][8] President Donald Trump, who said in 1999 that he “believed in universal health care” and said in 2000 that he wanted a “comprehensive health-care program” funded by “an increase in corporate taxes,” called the A.H.C.A., which would cause an estimated 24 million Americans to lose their insurance and would provide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to households making more than $250,000 annually, “a great plan,” and then told Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull that Australia, which has universal coverage, had “better health care” than the United States. “I’m president,” said Trump. “Can you believe it?”[9][10][11][12][13] Idaho representative Raúl Labrador told a town-hall audience that “nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care,” Alabama representative Mo Brooks said the bill would save money for those who “keep their bodies healthy,” and it was reported that Trump has a call button in the Oval Office that he uses to order Coca-Cola.[14][15][16] Trump visited Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey, where he has filed plans to build a mausoleum for himself, and it was reported that he has spent 36 days as president visiting his own properties, including his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, where the Secret Service has paid his club at least $35,000 for golf-cart rentals, and his golf club in Sterling, Virginia, which bears a plaque marking the site of a Civil War battle called the “River of Blood,” which never occurred.[17][18][19][20][21] It was reported that Trump’s son Eric once told a journalist while golfing that the Trump Organization doesn’t “rely on American banks” because it has “all the funding we need out of Russia”; the Senate requested all records of Russian communication from Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser who was once referred to as an “idiot” by Russian operatives attempting to recruit him as a spy; and Page responded to the request with a 4,000-word letter in which he quoted Maya Angelou, alluded to a scene from the movie The Big Short, and called former acting attorney general Sally Yates a “de facto anarchist.”[22][23][24][25][26] Trump tweeted that “the Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax”; FBI director James Comey asked the Department of Justice for a budget increase to expand the bureau’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia; Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had said he would recuse himself from the investigation after it was reported that he had made false claims to Congress about meeting with Russian officials during the campaign, wrote a letter to Trump recommending Comey be fired; and Trump, who reportedly screams at his television during news segments about the Russia probe, fired Comey.[27][28][29][30][31][32] “We have nothing to do with that,” Russian president Vladimir Putin said, without being asked.[33] Press Secretary Sean Spicer hid among the bushes outside the White House.[34]

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We all know dementia by now: the organ of the brain breaking down in substance and function much as a heart or liver does. By the time a person dies from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his or her brain is significantly smaller than its normal size. There are several major variants of this process, and the disorder’s progress takes many forms: insidious, incremental, dramatic, fast, and slow. The biology of loss is complicated and not entirely predictable; but in every case, memory, language, and motor control eventually slip away until a person finally sinks into silence and immobility. One could write volumes on the meaning of this gradual dissolving of a person — mustn’t it mean something?

No one would talk to me for this piece. Or rather, more than twenty women talked to me, sometimes for hours at a time, but only after I promised to leave out their names, and give them what I began to call deep anonymity. This was strange, because what they were saying did not always seem that extreme. Yet here in my living room, at coffee shops, in my inbox and on my voicemail, were otherwise outspoken female novelists, editors, writers, real estate agents, professors, and journalists of various ages so afraid of appearing politically insensitive that they wouldn’t put their names to their thoughts, and I couldn’t blame them.

Of course, the prepublication frenzy of Twitter fantasy and fury about this essay, which exploded in early January, is Exhibit A for why nobody wants to speak openly. Before the piece was even finished, let alone published, people were calling me “pro-rape,” “human scum,” a “harridan,” a “monster out of Stephen King’s ‘IT,’?” a “ghoul,” a “bitch,” and a “garbage person”—all because of a rumor that I was planning to name the creator of the so-called Shitty Media Men list. The Twitter feminist Jessica Valenti called this prospect “profoundly shitty” and “incredibly dangerous” without having read a single word of my piece. Other tweets were more direct: “man if katie roiphe actually publishes that article she can consider her career over.” “Katie Roiphe can suck my dick.” With this level of thought policing, who in their right mind would try to say anything even mildly provocative or original?

In the early Eighties, Andy King, the coach of the Seawolves, a swim club in Danville, California, instructed Debra Denithorne, aged twelve, to do doubles — to practice in the morning and the afternoon. King told Denithorne’s parents that he saw in her the potential to receive a college scholarship, and even to compete in the Olympics. Tall swimmers have an advantage in the water, and by the time Denithorne turned thirteen, she was five foot eight. She dropped soccer and a religious group to spend more time at the pool.

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Vets removed a six-pound tongue from a young Burmese moon bear who had been dragging it on the ground, a Vietnamese bile bear whose paws were amputated to make wine had learned to walk again, and the last dancing bears of Nepal were rescued.

The National Rifle Association sued Florida, the US president agreed to discuss nuclear weapons with the North Korean supreme leader who once called him a “dotard,” and an 89-year-old nun who was involved in a lawsuit trying to prevent pop star Katy Perry from purchasing a convent collapsed during a court appearance and died.

"Gun owners have long been the hypochondriacs of American politics. Over the past twenty years, the gun-rights movement has won just about every battle it has fought; states have passed at least a hundred laws loosening gun restrictions since President Obama took office. Yet the National Rifle Association has continued to insist that government confiscation of privately owned firearms is nigh. The NRA’s alarmism helped maintain an active membership, but the strategy was risky: sooner or later, gun guys might have realized that they’d been had. Then came the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, followed swiftly by the nightmare the NRA had been promising for decades: a dedicated push at every level of government for new gun laws. The gun-rights movement was now that most insufferable of species: a hypochondriac taken suddenly, seriously ill."